


Evening

by melannen



Series: Lots of Planets Have A South Downs [1]
Category: Saga (Comics)
Genre: Collection: Purimgifts Day 1, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-22
Updated: 2018-02-22
Packaged: 2019-03-22 10:25:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13762149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen





	Evening

**Author's Note:**

  * For [opalmatrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/gifts).



There's a point, after they first figure out what their legs are for, when many children are dedicated escape artists, heading at full tilt for the nearest gate or door as soon as an adult lets them out of eyesight.

I reached that point a few months before we landed on Gardenia. We'd stopped on a little backwater planet called Achene, which was best known for being one of the few places left where people from Wreath and Landfall lived together without actively killing each other. It was technically in Landfall's sphere of influence, but there had been Wreath settlers there too, it was said, since before the war started (although depending on who you asked, they'd started as either squatters who'd refused to leave, or slave laborers who'd been brought there against their will.) The two communities had been living together for so long that they relied on each other to keep the planet's agricultural economy running, and a long run of governments had managed to appease Landfall while making excuses for why they couldn't just expel the ethnically Wreath people.

My parents hoped it would be a place where we could refuel and check in without our odd little family standing out too much, so they'd left me at the ship with Granny while they went into the nearest town to go shopping and work on finding a place where my mother could get a job.

Granny still wasn't used to the idea that I could run faster than she could, and nobody had yet thought to tell the ship not to let me open the door, so as soon as she sat down with her book, I ran for it, and I was out the door and into the trees before she even noticed I was gone.

We'd landed in a clearing in an open, cultivated forest, where the ship more-or-less blended in, and it was beautiful. That's the main thing I remember - the light dappling down through the bright green canopy of broadleaf trees in a thousand shades of gold, catching on their red and yellow tasseled flowers that were putting out so much pollen that every sunbeam danced with it. There were brightly-colored flying creatures among the branches, and green moss and tiny star-shaped white flowers with red berries underfoot, and a million new things to look at for a person who'd spent most of her life so far in the same old rocketship.

I didn't even stop moving long enough to notice I was lost until the sun set. But the sun set early and _fast_ in that season and that place, and it seemed like between kneeling down to look at a little wine-purple spider and standing up, it had become too dark to see, and suddenly I realized I didn't know where anyone else was and I was scared.

Luckily, I had Izabel. She'd popped back into existence just as the last of the light was gone, and she had her arms crossed and was frowning at me, so I certainly couldn't cry, or admit I was regretting having run.

"Hazel, what do you think you're doing?" she said. "Klara is worried out of her mind!"

"Hi," I said, and then turned and booked it again. Izabel gave off enough light that I could see, and I knew I couldn't lose _her_ , and as long as _she_ was there, everything would be fine. 

She was a pretty good babysitter, but what she _couldn't_ do was physically pick me up and make me stop running, and I'd long ago stopped being scared of her illusions. And at that age, reasoning and bargaining don't do much good, so all she could do was follow me and try to get me to listen and stop and come back.

I didn't, of course. I kept running just for the fun of it, and then I saw a light ahead and thought it might be the rocketship, and thought about how fun it would be if I came back home all by myself without Izabel, so I ran toward it, until I tripped over a fallen branch and tumbled head-over-feet into another clearing.

It wasn't the rocketship that was giving off the light. It was a little cottage with lace curtains and a flowerpot on the doorstep.

"Hazel, come back here!" Izabel hissed. "We don't want to bother the nice people!"

"Hmm," I said. It looked just like the cottages she used to show me out of some of the bedtime stories she told, and I refused to believe anybody in it would be mean. It felt like a nice place. So I marched right across the clearing - _through_ Izabel when she tried to stop me - and knocked on the door.


End file.
